STAR WARS III: Revenge of the Sith (2005) - A movie Review

This is the only film that I have seen in the theatre this summer and although I saw it way back in June, and I enjoyed it more than the first two, I've since been troubled by it's meaning as it relates to the series.

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The most revealing thing about this final film is what wasted opportunity this whole series was. It’s the best entry in the new trilogy, but that’s only because George Lucas actually uses the background material we’re familiar with and he has fewer opportunities to expand and revise his vision. You can forgive ridiculous ideas like Chewbacca being a pal of Yoda in Episode III, but it’s hard to forgive the series when you realize how far he has strayed from the original material with the first two episodes.

Lucas was once a young filmmaker struggling to become somebody and that struggle is embodied in the Luke Skywalker character from the first trilogy. Mark Hamill isn’t a great actor, but he's an earnest one and his struggle to overcome was gripping for three films. Lucas can no longer identify with Luke’s struggle to find himself. You need to understand self-doubt to write that character. Now Lucas is a man that has made some of the biggest box office successes of all time and the only holdout to his greatness are film critics and the Academy Awards. So Annakin’s struggle is not finding his place in the world but being recognized for his greatness by the Jedi counsel.

Luke’s struggle was man v. self while Annakin’s struggle is more man v. society. Lucas had an inherent understanding of the first conflict and we the middle class filmgoers could identify readily. Unlike Orson Welles who could show you the greatness of the character struggling against society, Lucas shows you a sniveling brat that’s whining and he has to remind you with dialogue of how he’s the “chosen one” because he can’t show you any greatness. The plot shows the one great character to be Obi-Wan Kenobi, but the dialogue wants us to believe Annakin is more important. The ending of this movie should be tragic with the supposedly “great” Annakin being forced into the dark side. The ending of Jedi with Vader finding his inner goodness is now hollow because we didn’t see any deepness in this current trilogy. His motivations are all selfish.

Had this second trilogy been produced immediately after JEDI, it might have retained something from the early films. The harbinger for these last three can be seen in the Special Edition films from the late 90s when Lucas re-edited episode IV to have the Greedo character shoot at Han Solo before he’s smoked. Besides the fact that there is no way Greedo could miss Solo shooting him at point blank range, it’s most significant because it changes the whole complex nature of Solo’s character. The point before was that Solo was a rogue that would do anything to avoid the arm of Jabba and he entered into the deal with Ben and Luke to pay off his debt to the mob boss. He slowly comes around in the series to see himself as part of a larger community. This is a character of the greatest tradition in American film, played most effectively by people like Humphrey Bogart in CASABLANCA. By changing that one thing in the first film, Solo’s character has no where to grow. Now it’s just a matter of time before Solo stops the big talk and signs on with the rebellion.

This new trilogy misses those two elements, the young man’s struggle with self-doubt and the rogue’s gradual realization that he belongs in a community of like minded individuals. The only real theme I can identify is the danger of unrecognized genius. That’s the most self-indulgent and boring choice a filmmaker could choose, but I don’t think he consciously chose it, rather I think that these new screenplays were an outpouring of his current auto-biography and that became the most consistent theme of his current life.

Like many, I had longed that he would continue this story someday, but his break after Jedi was detrimental to his thinking on these characters and the meaning of the story overall. He no longer identifies with the characters he created in the mid 70s and is in some ways he’s embarrassed by them. It shows in the inconsistencies and changing motivations in the two series. The larger part of Episode III should have really been episode I with the more stories to follow to flesh out Annakin’s fall.

Now Lucas is done making Star Wars films and rather than explain more of the universe that meant so much to many of us in our youth, he has muddied the whole thing. He says he won’t re-release the old version ever again. These wretched SE versions are now considered the definitive work. Choices like the insertion of cartoon Jabba in episode one and Han’s emasculating are now the new “truths.” It’s like Van Gogh lived to be 80 and went back and painted modern looking clothing on his authentic period subjects.

It’s a loss to those who will read about the importance of Star Wars in 1970s cinema, but will never actually get to see the movies that we saw. Orson Welles was once quoted as saying he wanted Ted Turner to keep his crayons off his films, although Turner never eradicated the original version of any movie. Lucas owns the Star Wars films and can cut them up and throw them into the fireplace if he likes, but it’s a weak choice to not let your original work stand as a testament of the time. I now wish Lucas would have been as tired of STAR WARS as Sean Connery was of James Bond. Too bad that we couldn’t imagine how great the films might have been rather than live with the reality that lightning didn’t strike twice except if you mean it burned down everything the original films stood for.